Silhouette Studio – The First Design

In the last two posts, I talked about setting up the Silhouette Curio and installing the Silhouette Studio software. Click here to read those posts. This post covers the my first design.

This is my first design attempt. Nothing fancy.

My First Studio Design

To start a new design in Silhouette Studio double-click on the icon and click Design. The design window opens with a clean working area.

I clicked the Text icon to begin to place text in the design area. On the right-side of the screen, a Text Style menu appeared. The menu let me define my text attributes before or after I put the text in the design area. Scrolling through the fonts, I noticed that it allows me to use any font that is saved on my computer. Yay! No, limits there.

I noticed the little circle to the bottom right of my text. Looking through the manual, I discovered this allows you to fit the text to a path. I drew a couple of wavy lines on the screen using the curve tool. I doubled clicked on the first line of text, to select it, and dragged the text to the first wavy line and than I repeated the process with the second line of text. Easy enough, my text was now wavy.

Selecting the text that was fit to path, I was no longer able to rotate it or change it size by dragging a corner. I was able to adjust the rotation by selecting it’s line. There was also a slide bar that allowed me to change the text position on the line.

If I am doing a birthday theme design, some balloons are needed. I knew the oval would not work for me because balloons are bigger on the top than the bottom. I selected the curve tool to draw my balloon. I put multiple points around the balloon to get the general shape I wanted. The bottom point, where the balloon ties, is still too round. I clicked the Edit Points

Just for fun I drew a few more balloons. Balloons usually have a shiny spot on them that is reflecting the light. I use the rectangle tool to draw this area on a couple of balloons. It didn’t look quite right, so I selected the rounded rectangle tool to draw the shiny spot on the other balloons.

If I move the balloons around the canvas, I wanted the balloon and shiny area to move together. I dragged my curser over both objects and selected the grouping icon to keep them together. To separate items after they are group, select the Ungroup icon next to the Group icon.

A border for my birthday theme design would be nice. I drew a couple of rectangles and I drew numerous ovals . First I drew one oval, then I used the copy/paste feature so all the ovals would be the same size. I tried rotating a oval from the design area, but I found for a precise rotation the Rotate option for the Object menu worked better. I used the Align option under the Object menu to align, center, and space the ovals on around the rectangles.

I didn’t like how some of the lines in the design. The Erase and Knife was a nice feature for removing unwanted lines. I was able to adjust the settings in the right menu as each tool was being used.

A feature that the Silhouette Studio software is missing, is the ability for me to zoom in and out using the scroll button on my mouse. Zoom in and Zoom out is available from the top icon bar.

The manual that came with the Curio did not cover all of these functions. But, the manual that is available from the Help Menu in the software does provide detail information about all tools, menus, and functions. I like to play around with any software before reading manuals. However, this manual is beneficial for using the software and Curio.

The next blog will cover my experience with cutting and embossing. For now, I will save my work. This isn’t the first time I have saved my work. One of my saying is “Save Often! Save Regularly!” You can’t press save too often.